2am Dances With My Father | Cid Galicia

2am Dances With My Father

_{I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate by what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-Theodore Roethke}

Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.
Always stirring in the early am hours –for prayer, for stamps, or for chess.
No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.

Ironic now, how my father and The Middle East have made amends.
The 2am World Cup Futbol games that the continent of Qatar sends.
Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.

The last few months in Los Angeles, I worked the graveyard shift 10pm to 10am.
Six months later I put in my two weeks and moved home at my parents request.
No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.

Now home drinking coffee and wine. I call it Roethke’s Wake to Sleep Blend
2am I walk to the bathroom, occupied by him. Later the kitchen again in his possess.
Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.

As ghosts we haunt these halls each night, of my old home to no end.
Conversing with our demons and angels , some damned and some
blessed. No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.

Old blood never sleeps well– doesn’t now, didn’t then.
Much unforgiven in our chests, walking hearts without rest.
Sleep is like food for my father. It is simply fuel for old Mexican Men.
No beauty in closed eyes. My sleep now is as food for my father has been.

Cid Galicia is a Mexican American poet who taught in New Orleans for over the past decade. He is in the final year of his MFA, through The University of Nebraska Omaha. He is a poetry editor for The Good Life Review, a reader for The Kitchen Table Quarterly, and this year’s FIRECRACKER Poetry Manuscript Awards. He was the recipient of the Richard Duggin Fellowship—granted for demonstrated excellence in writing, runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Helen W. Kenefick Poetry Prize, and most recently nominated for the Helen Hansen Outstanding Graduate Student Award. He is currently living in Los Angeles as an Intern to The Editor for The Red Hen Press. His work has appeared in The Watershed Review, the National Poetry Month Issue of The Elevation Review, Trestle Ties Issue 5, and the upcoming spring issue of Trampoline.